Shared language
Glossary.
Gaia uses precise words for concrete things. Here is what each one means.
menu_book
- APIs
- Open interfaces that let allied networks read and sync the ecosystem’s data with minimal redundancy, without depending on a central platform.
- Assets
- Everything the ecosystem stewards and puts to work for life: land, infrastructure, knowledge and relationships. Under the multi-capital proposition, not only what appears on a balance sheet.
- Biomes
- Large ecological communities defined by their climate, soil and life: jungle, ocean, living soil. Gaia uses them as the unit for steering funds and measuring impact.
- Communities
- Groups of 13 to 150 people, of up to 16 sub-circles. They correspond to Dunbar’s number: the scale at which relationships remain personal and stable.
- CoRe Economy
- The ecosystem’s fair-exchange mechanisms, rewarding positive actions, referrals, donations and the creation of synergies.
- Councils
- Deliberation spaces where representatives of several circles or territories settle what none can settle alone. They do not rule over the parts: they coordinate between them.
- Distributed governance
- A model in which decision-making is not concentrated in a single centre but across multiple nodes, coordinated by fields of work and by territory: communities, holons and councils.
- Dunbar’s number
- Around 150: the human cognitive limit for maintaining stable social relationships. It sets the maximum size of a community in the Confederation’s architecture.
- Economic viability
- A project’s capacity to sustain itself over time without depending on perpetual donation or on extracting value from its own territory.
- Gaia Passport
- A unified container of identity, reputation and membership. It gathers each participant’s personal badges, skill credentials and organisational memberships.
- Glocal
- What operates locally and globally at once. The Gaia GPS platform is glocal: it bridges each territory’s autonomy with planetary interdependence.
- Holons
- A unit that is at once a complete whole and part of a larger whole. In Gaia’s architecture these are groups of 3 to 13 people — families, clans or teams — bound by high trust and close collaboration.
- Impact measurement
- Recording what a project actually changes in its territory, assessed across all four forms of capital — natural, social, cultural and intellectual — and not only in money.
- Radical trust
- A coordination principle that starts from good faith rather than hierarchical control, and backs it with transparency and verification. It is the protocol that lets multiple decision-making centres operate without a central authority.
- Regeneration
- A structured process of ecological, social, cultural and personal renewal, drawing on permaculture, regenerative design and spiritual traditions. It does not aim to sustain what exists, but to restore living systems’ capacity to create more life.
- Specialised funds
- Impact Fund vehicles allocated and steered by biome — Jungle, Ocean, Living Soil — so that each flow of capital is governed by the ecological criteria of its territory.
- Stewardship
- Caring for and holding an asset on behalf of the collective and of future generations, rather than extractive private ownership. A steward answers for the health of what they hold, not for its yield.
- Strategic capital
- Resources Gaia Union allocates not to immediate return but to sustaining shared infrastructure: governance, verification, and the shared goods no single actor would fund alone.
- Systemic
- Attending to a system’s whole web of relationships rather than to its parts in isolation. Seen this way, climate collapse, inequality and social fragmentation are interconnected symptoms of one cause: separation.
Missing a term?
The glossary grows with the ecosystem. Write to us if a definition is missing.